Ira Hoffecker
A few years ago, during isolation, I started to paint flowers from my summer flower garden, and plants I encountered during my daily walks and added those shapes to my compositions with geometric structures and architectural elements. The shapes and colours of flowers and plants bring me a sense of joy and wholeness. Some of these paintings extended beyond individual plant studies and became landscapes.
In these new works, I began to use oil paint, which I found to be a fantastic medium for representing plants and natural landscapes. Oil has its own application regime. Working with oil paints and painting organic material introduced themes and processes into my work, which are still unfolding, repopulating my pictorial landscapes with fresh formations.
I have started to name my paintings after titles of books that I am reading and music pieces that I listen to while I create. During the last years I also had the privilege of being exposed to several live jazz music and opera performances during our residency times in New York. I incorporate the passionate foundations of jazz rhythmic extemporization and operatic complexities through the fervent rendering of lively abstract and organic shapes. I start the underpainting with an abstract composition in acrylic and use color and abstract shapes to translate the many different impulses I experience in the big city. I enliven the piece with organic shapes in oil. During my years of studying art, I have done a lot of research in regards to color theory and I take pleasure in applying what I have learned from the color masters and theorists like Itten, Albers, Goethe and others.
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The different identities cities take on over time inform my abstract urban paintings which you can find in the Structures/Architecture Gallery. I am interested in the ways that urban geography is reshaped by history. My work portrays cycles of revision and restoration in the man-made landscape by replicating the geometric shapes of maps, architectural drawings and photographs.
